PAULDING, Ohio — An early May storm that soaked Paulding County cleared up nearly a day ago, and
the drains buried beneath Terry McClure’s farm fields are doing their job.

The white plastic pipe that funnels water into a ditch along County Road 48 helps keep the 4,000
acres of soft, red winter wheat from becoming a swamp.

Drainage tiles are doing the same thing beneath thousands of fields across the county and
state.

But this pipe is different. It is fitted with a tube that sucks a portion of the drain water
into a sampling bottle.

A few yards away is another device that samples stormwater that flows along the top of the field
toward the same ditch.

For at least the next three years, rainwater runoff from this field and 29 others across Ohio
will be collected and tested. They’ll help a team of scientists from Ohio State University and the
U.S. Department of Agriculture measure how much phosphorus it contains.

Phosphorus is a byproduct of manure and fertilizers in farm runoff water. It’s the stuff that is
finding its way into Ohio lakes, including Lake Erie, Buckeye Lake and Grand Lake St. Marys, where
it helps blue-green algae grow into toxic blooms that threaten wildlife and billions of dollars in
tourism.

The study could be key to devising plans to reduce phosphorus runoff from farms.Farm groups,
including the Ohio Soybean Council, the Ohio Corn & Wheat Growers Association and the Ohio Farm
Bureau Federation, have matched a $1 million USDA grant to fund the effort.

“We have a big audience. A lot of people are watching this very closely,” said Kevin King, a
hydrologist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. Scientists have
long known that farms are a prime source of dissolved phosphorus that winds up in lakes.

Heavy spring rains in 2011 flushed 473 tons of phosphorus down the Maumee River to Lake Erie,
according to stream monitors kept by Heidelberg University’s National Center for Water Quality
Research.

That summer, a record algae bloom stretched from Toledo to Cleveland. Last year, the bloom was
90 percent smaller because of near-drought conditions that resulted in just 69 tons of phosphorus
reaching Lake Erie.

Among the questions that continue to bedevil researchers are how much phosphorus each farm
contributes and which methods to keep it out of streams work best. The new study should help.

“It’s pretty important from several respects, not the least of which is there just hasn’t been
much of this work done,” said Peter Richards, senior research scientist at Heidelberg.

Elizabeth Dayton, an OSU soil scientist, said she wants to see how different soils and crops
affect the amount of phosphorus in runoff.Dayton and King both said they’d like to get samples from
fields that grow wheat, corn and soybeans in subsequent growing seasons. Each field is monitored
for organic content, soil texture and phosphorus amounts.

Some farmers already use conservation practices to limit fertilizer runoff, including planting
grass along ditches to help soak up phosphorus. Others use soil tests and computerized field
mapping to try to limit the amount of fertilizers to what the crops require.“What we don’t know is
how much (phosphorus) savings come with each practice,” Dayton said.

Samples taken from these types of fields should help determine which is most effective at
containing phosphorus, the researchers say.

Farmers who participate in the study will have to supply information about drainage practices,
manure and fertilizer applications and when they plant and reap their crops.

McClure said he’s happy to participate.“We need to better understand what our part of the
problem is,” he said.One of the ultimate goals of the research is to refine Ohio’s phosphorus risk
index, which many farmers use to estimate how much fertilizer or manure they can safely put on
fields to help grow crops.

“We’d like to give the farming community not just one thing to do but about five things that
would help,” said Jeff Reutter, the director of Ohio State’s Sea Grant Program and Stone Laboratory
on Lake Erie. “The one that I promote probably the most is incorporating the phosphorus into the
soil rather than simply spreading it on the surface.”

Dayton and King said it will take several years of work to come up with final recommendations
and data showing phosphorus concentration in runoff.Until then: “We’ll have a microscope on what’s
coming off this field,” Dayton said.